With the advent of mainstream genetically modified organism (GMO) crops, GMO based specialty crops, and the growth in Organic farming, more and more interest has been raised the area of crop traceability. Crops of one type grown too close to crops of a different type may become contaminated by genetic material from the incompatible crops grown nearby. The ultimate in this regard, would be to be able to trace an individual kernel of grain to an accurate geo-referenced point where it was grown. Obviously this is impractical in the world today. However, traceability in some form is practical today.
One way this can be done today using detailed record keeping and strict product segregation. It is very practical today to record the region in each field where a load of product comes from and trace that product through delivery systems to their destination. However, it requires a tradeoff. It is not practical to segregate each load of product all the way through the delivery chain to a destination. So loads or regions must be combined and segregated at a much larger unit size. Even this provides difficulties as multiple containers are emptied into much larger containers and those are split between much smaller containers. As this occurs, the ability to accurately tell all of the possible sources for a container of product becomes more difficult and less precise.
To better understand the difficulties involved, consider this realistic scenario for corn distribution. A farmer harvests three fields of corn. Each hopper of corn is dumped into a grain cart and that is in turn dumped into a truck along with other cart loads of grain and hauled to the farmstead. Loads from field A and half of field B are hauled in one truckload and loads from the other half of field B and all of field C are hauled in another truckload. These two truckloads of grain are dumped into a holding bin at the farmstead along with other loads of grain. The grain is then dried and placed into another bin along with the loads of grain harvested from 10 other fields.
Then two truckloads are hauled from this bin to the elevator and sold. The elevator transfers this grain to a silo that also contains loads of grain from 30 other farmers. At a later point in time, the grain elevator sells 50 percent of this grain and it is loaded into 10 rail cars and delivered to a river port. At the river port these rail cars are loaded onto three barges along with grain from four other elevators. These barges travel down the Mississippi river to the gulf. There they are loaded onto a cargo ship along with the grain from forty other barges. The cargo ship travels to Japan and is unloaded into a storage facility. The grain is then shipped by truck to six different endpoints. This illustrates the difficulties involved. The problem is: how can one determine where the delivered grain came from?
Today with good record keeping, one can determine that a specific truckload delivered may have come from one or more of the 70,000 or more locations that fed into the supply chain. With more intense record keeping, one may be able to record the individual combination and division of product and provide a very crude probability of a given source being in the delivery based on a random distribution of product.
In the fully traceable world, the recipients of the grain would be able to tell the various sources and locations of the grain they received. In the world today, this can be tracked by transaction based record keeping, but it has two weaknesses. First, is the need to divide the loads into small enough amounts or areas that the records contain enough precision to be useful. As the loads are made smaller to provide more precision, the record keeping increases. The second issue is that the only thing one can know about the amount of a potential source (load) that gets included in a split between several containers is either based on an even distribution of product in the large container or based on performing dynamic flow calculations on the containers. With storage facilities that have stirators an even distribution may be more accurate. In others, performing some form of flow analysis may be more accurate.
What is needed are new methods, systems, and apparatuses which provide for tracing grain in an accurate and convenient manner.